eVestment Wants To Change The Way Retail Traders Invest

eVestment's newest product, SmartVision Analytics, is a first for the company, allowing financial advisors to bring institutional investor insights to retail investors.

"We have about 100 registered investment advisors that use some of our core products and analytics, holdings analysis and asset flow tools," Larry Shumbres, vice president of eVestment, told Benzinga. "Based on their feedback, we built a product, SmartVision, around easy access to the institutional intelligence, as well as a search capability and filters for those advisors to easily get to a product."

It is also possible to filter by strategy and compare/analyze products based on investors' needs, their models and their portfolios.

"That's really the idea behind SmartVision," he said. "The whole goal was to really have more of an enterprise agreement with these institutions so they can offer it for free to their financial advisors."

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Getting It Done

Shumbres said that eVestment is one of the largest institutional data analytics companies in the world.

"The tools that we offer have data in there that isn't available anywhere else or in any other tools," he explained. "eVestment was started in 2000 by a number of our founders. They came from the consulting world at Towers Watson. Their whole idea was very similar to a lot of other products you see in the marketplace. They said there had to be a better way to gain access to institutional data and analyze that data to the level that they were comfortable with."

Today eVestment has become a global enterprise with more than 350 employees worldwide. The firm is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and has opened offices in New York City, London, Hong Kong, Sydney and Dubai.

As for SmartVision Analytics, Shumbres said this is the "first time we had a product that has a reasonable price point for financial advisors, as well as a tool that could add value to them."

"If you look at the trillions of dollars of investible assets out there, half of those assets are in the retail investments, which are your mutual funds, ETFs, stocks and bonds," he said. "The other half is in the institutional assets. Financial advisors are really only seeing half the story and they're only telling half the story to their clients."

Shumbres said that institutions place large trades – as much as $1 billion at a time – and that's what moves the market.

"It's not the retail data," Shumbres added. "By the time a financial advisor gets access to that data, the institution has already made their big change. You look at asset flows from the retail side, they're really lagging the institutional asset flows by about six to 12 months. And that's a big difference! For financial advisors to finally have access to the same data that the institutions have is a huge game-changer for them and their clients."

Fidelity and UBS Group AG (USA) UBS are among eVestment's current clients that are looking at adding SmartVision Analytics. LPL Financial Holdings Inc LPLA is already on board.

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.

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